Search This Blog

Notched Fished and Quartered: Show Me the Greene.

One of the hardest thing about reaching out to the community and discussing game development is a lot of the game developer "memes" stick in the minds of it all too well. Absolute legends, like Notch, Phil Fish, Greene, Sean Murray. These are people who poured their hearts into development to give us something new, risky exciting, raw. It's not for everyone. It's frustrating, repetitive and you can sell 50M copies and have an entire community hate you because other people are being assholes in your game.
I've come a long way in my developer line of thought. 2005-2013 I thought sandbox games were the effervescence of the gaming experience. Now I think that thinking with Theme park game philosophy in mind makes a lot more sense in the world of VR. I don't want travel time to be long between features. I want features to be close, detailed and dense. Only the highest quality PBR RTX ready assets are being used. I want the world to be full of mini games. For example club DJ mini game. Where a player becomes a DJ in a live club. Lots of little features are planned to keep a wide variety of the room scale task simulators style game play. That's what a theme park is hundreds of things to do and plenty of places to hang out. We've got like the best mirrors for the Recreational and chat world VR fans. Head pats and nVidia Hairworks enabled.
I'm trying to revive the sense of massively multiplayer in VR games. Not a 32 player room with load screens but a "seamless" world with 1-10k+ Players in a simultaneous world at once. A sense that you can always walk into a new crowd and meet people. Without the loneliness of load screens. Thriving AI characters also fill the world by the thousands. There will never be a shortage of interaction for anyone. I want guilds to be small to big. I want to listen to a unified fan base. I want to reach for the largest simultaneous player base in VR from day one. I want want thousands of people to log on day 1 and just go wild over the gameplay.
I'm Committed to trying to reach some sense of completion before the release. There are 8 of 11 core features finished and a backlog of dozens of features partially implemented. There are 21 world features mostly completed with 50 more at some stage of implementation and 50 more planned once one more of the core features is complete. The development has picked up pace with to the point that it's worth waiting another 6 weeks or 6 months even. I think what we need in the VR community is completion.
I just hope the community will be there to support my game...if it deserves it. Currently, VR is by far the most interesting developing technology in gaming. Although it has be theorized and prototyped for decades. It's only just now in the last 3 years hitting the hands of actual gamers. For all the curiosity it generates, it suffers from a huge problem. It's market size after three years is only a couple of million headsets total. This means that the best case scenario for sales is 2,000,000, right? Unfortunately no, even the best example I can find for best sales ratio of all time, the iconic Zelda: Ocarina of Time a game of the year on a console that sold proportionally very few units was sold to 1 in 4 n64 gamers. The best a VR title can realistically hope for is around 50,000-100,000 sales. That's for the fewer than 100 games. Yet, again the 1-2 million dollars math may trick you but that can't keep the lights on for a team any larger than 2-3 full time people and a few contractors here and there for 24 months.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alamin v0.1 development is speeding along. The first rendition of the demo Isle of Adventure is rapidly approaching completion:

What is Alamin?

Alamin is a VRMMO featured around a giant floating island in the middle of a hollow world where adventurers descend to:

What can be done in Alamin?
The world of Alamin is special because it features two game modes within the same game, cooperative and competitive. The Isle of Adventure is cooperative, choosing games and game modes that exist in the interiors of the modern buildings of the Adventurer's city.

Isle of Adventure features:

Highway System and racingFour different Night ClubsArcades and dinersPubs and BarsThree Parks12 different styles of player residences with movable furniture2 of the Main story line's templesTrading card gameCar ownership and modificationSeveral practice arenas for various classes and skillsCompleted isle to be around 10km2Complex character creation
World of Alamin Features…

Alamin Development is speeding along. The revival of the "themepark" style of level design and gameplay can be seen in every corner. With over 21 large interiors(100+ under development) seamlessly integrated into the overworld never get bored waiting for a level to load. Alamin features the first use of the full capacities of the Unreal Engine network technology allowing for servers to reach 1000+ Players simultaneously. With hundreds of passive NPCs roaming the world for a complete sense of lively immersion and presence.